In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (3 page)

Focus Frasier’s Transforms did as instructed.  They now gave off the odor of pain and misery, not that Enkidu cared.  One of the normals who accompanied Frasier’s household tried to take the Focus from Enkidu’s grasp, earning himself a growl and a cuff.  He tried to flee, but Cleo snagged him with a free hand.

“None of this.  We’re taking you to a more secure facility.”

The normal gave up his fight and followed Enkidu and Focus Frasier.  They led the entire mess out of the Clinic and into the bus.  To Enkidu’s surprise, not one of Frasier’s Transforms attempted to flee.  Four of the normal companions of the Transforms tried to get on the bus as well, but Gwen and Enkidu tossed them back off, along with the normal Cleo had snagged, as soon as the crew of Transforms was settled.  Enkidu’s pack had as many normal slaves as he could support, and none of this crew appeared to be keepers anyway.

“In and out in less than fifteen minutes,” Cleo said, when they were on their way back home.  She scanned the checklist and marked off the last item.  “Clean.”

Enkidu licked his lips and took another sniff of the Focus.  “Bah.  I’m not sure why we bothered.”  She smelled as bad as a normal.

---

“Very good, very good,” Wandering Shade said.  The late afternoon sun scorched the wide expanse of the Illinois cornfields as he paced in front of the hog-tied Focus and her hog-tied Transforms, dressed as he had been for months as a high-ranking officer of the Illinois State Police.  “Dispose of the bus.”

The exchange point was down a narrow dirt road at the edge of Odin’s territory.  They gathered among the daisies, goldenrod and thistle that filled the gap between corn and road.  The fresh scent of wildflowers in the warm sun might have even been pleasant, except for the overwhelming odor of Hunter, Monster, and prey.  Odin, in his half-beast form, paced anxiously across the invisible territorial line that snaked across the farmland west of Romeoville, a dozen feet from the cluster of cowering captive Transforms.

“Master, the kidnapping worked as you planned,” Enkidu said, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his broad shoulders. Too much heat for a combat, but perfect for the post-combat celebration of victory.

“It will always work as I plan, if my plans are carried out correctly,” Wandering Shade said.  “Your understanding isn’t needed to obey orders.”  He paused and sneered at Enkidu.  “Bring out the surprise.”

Four of Odin’s pack Gals dragged a tiny wisp of a man out of Odin’s semi-truck.  They pushed him over the invisible territory line, where he stumbled and then fell with a clank of chains at Enkidu’s feet.  Enkidu’s eyebrows shot up.  “A Crow?  Master, you’re giving me a
Crow
?”

“I thought it fitting, given your incessant prattling about how you’d like to have that bastard, Gilgamesh,” Wandering Shade said.  Enkidu wasn’t sure what changed, but Gilgamesh had done something to move him from being the butt of Wandering Shade’s jokes to the top of Wandering Shade’s shit list.  He fully expected the Shade to parade Gilgamesh in similar chains someday.  “It took me far too long to figure out the right method to alter the Law to grab a Crow slave’s mind, but I’ve finally got it.  This one’s yours, but his real loyalty is to the Hunter Empire.”  Wandering Shade’s voice turned soft and low.  “Name him and figure out how to use him, Enkidu.  Someday he’ll be a legend among the Crows, the object lesson for why the tricky minded Crows must cooperate with us…or else.”

Enkidu bent down to the broken man, this shivering wild-eyed Crow, in terrible health and with seeping shackle-galls, and picked up one of the chains.  “I’m Enkidu, your new Master.”

The Crow wet himself, a sharp odor to join the rich scents of the Hunter gathering.  Such a disgusting creature.  Enkidu suspected this Crow had been in the Shade’s care for quite a long time.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m called Orange.”

Perfect.  Enkidu laughed loudly.  “Not anymore.  Your new name is Urine.”

“Master,” Urine whispered.  “I will serve you under the Law.”

“Oh, you shall,” Enkidu said, and smiled a carnivorous grin.

Gilgamesh: August 7, 1968

“How’d you get here so quick?” Sky said.  Gilgamesh had parked his car five blocks away from the Inferno household and Sky had corralled him half way there, in a neighborhood of expensive estates and ancient oaks.  The afternoon sun shone cheerily in a brilliant blue sky and the Boston summer heat was cool by Houston standards.

“I was visiting Occum when I got the message.”  Gilgamesh studied his erstwhile pseudo-Guru.  The older Crow appeared settled, not overstressed as he had been in Houston after the Rogue Focus takedown.  The short, stocky Crow wore yellow plaid shorts and a bright orange golf shirt, loud enough to make Gilgamesh wince.  “Do we have an emergency?”

They leisurely ambled down the shady sidewalks.  In the distance, Gilgamesh heard children playing kickball.  The latest kick had been foul.  Or maybe not.  The children were still arguing.  “Perhaps.  Lori’s been locked in her room for over a day, and she did something to me to make me forget where her room was.”  Sky chuckled.  “Which, by the way, is an excellent trick I’m still trying to figure out.”

Gilgamesh did a quick scan of Sky and didn’t pick up any juice patterns on him.  “Did she send for me, then?”

“No, but I can’t imagine her turning you down if you showed up,” Sky said.  “For one thing, I suspect the work I’ve been doing on the Commander’s suggestion may have something to do with it.”  Without warning Sky vanished from Gilgamesh’s metasense.  “I’ve got it to where I can cover two people if they’re standing close together.”

“Great,” Gilgamesh said, twitchy.  It made him nervous for people to vanish out of his metasense, even if they were standing beside him when they did so, and he could still see them.

Dealing with Sky and Lori always resembled an amusement park ride.  Inferno was just as bad, with their advanced training and extreme security consciousness.  Sky’s sudden and still unexplained decision to rename his Tiamat as ‘the Commander’ practically gave Gilgamesh vertigo.  The place made him feel inadequate, even with his extensive Arm experience.

And there was Lori waving at him from inside her room, signaling for him to come up.  Even though he was well outside her metasense range.  Worse, Sky didn’t even notice, prattling on about the various missions he and Inferno were doing to further the Rizzari rebellion, interspersed with gossip about the fledgling Focus grabbed from a Chicago Clinic, supposedly by a low end Focus named Casso, on the orders of Focus Biggioni.  Inferno had bagged two ‘agents’ in the last week, both attempting to expose Transform job-holders in allied households, and one of Inferno’s spies in Philly had alibied Biggioni for the evening the Focus vanished.  Carol suspected the Focus had run off in fear given the confusing evidence left behind, including the ‘submit to me or die’ letter written on Focus Biggioni’s letterhead.  She thought the ‘Focus Casso’ story a likely fabrication by the Clinic workers to cover their asses.  Gilgamesh suspected worse.

“I guess I’ll just have to see what I can do,” Gilgamesh said, gently leading Sky toward the Inferno household.  Ann Chiron met them at the door, as if she owned the place.  With the way she was cozying up to Sky and her aura of command he might have thought Ann was the Focus here, save for her non-exceptional appearance and lack of a Focus’s glow.

“Uncanny as always, Gilgamesh,” Ann said.  “Sky’s more worried than we are.  Lori’s just having a bit of angst.  She isn’t neglecting her Focus duties.”

“I’ll knock first,” Gilgamesh said.  From inside her tiny room Lori was sign-language strangling someone, likely Sky, Ann or both.  Sky, from his ignorance, still couldn’t metasense Lori.

Dealing with either of the three Arms was far easier than dealing with Inferno.

---

He didn’t have to knock.  Lori opened her door a crack, to verify it was him, and let him into her tiny room, nothing more than the closed off end of a hallway.

“Focus Rizzari,” Gilgamesh said.  He wasn’t sure which Lori he would be dealing with today.  There seemed so many.  He didn’t get any amorous vibes from her this time, but he did notice the box of tissues and wadded up mess of tissues overflowing the small trash can.  “I was visiting…”

“Shh.”  Lori led him over to her undersized bed, sat him down, and sat down beside him.  She leaned against him and put his arms around her.  “Perfect.  Uncomplicated and unconfused affection.”

To which Gilgamesh didn’t say a thing.  If his feelings toward Lori weren’t complicated and confused, he couldn’t imagine what she ordinarily dealt with.

While Lori luxuriated in his embrace, he absent-mindedly picked dross off her and did a detailed examination of Inferno.  Today was Saturday, meaning Lori was possibly in the dumps from Inferno’s Friday night fling.  She normally recovered by noon, though, and it was late afternoon.  Of the 32 Transforms currently on site, eleven of them appeared recently re-tagged and all of their glows metasensed cleaner than he remembered.  Ann’s looked practically pristine.  Hmm.  Without much work, Gilgamesh identified two other women Transforms, one he recognized by her glow (Eileen) and one other, who were similarly clean.  These were Sky’s lovers.  He also figured out how Lori was fooling Sky, with a staged set of juice patterns in the hallway that first played with his metasense and later tweaked his memory so he wouldn’t remember being in the hallway.  Nasty.  He also identified three Chimera traces around the poolside cabana, six days old, which belonged to Hoskins, Sellers and Knox.  Occum’s Nobles, which Gilgamesh knew far better than he liked.  This was new.  When he last visited here, before the Rogue Focus takedown, Lori had said she had never met any of the Nobles.

Lori giggled and put Gilgamesh’s hand on her lower belly.  Kick.  Kick.  Gilgamesh smiled at the faint baby movements.  “You’re over half way through, aren’t you?”

“Uh huh.  Almost five months along,” Lori said.  Her voice was low and dreamy.  Relaxed.  “The pregnancy is behind a bunch of the problems I’m having.  The hormones are playing with my juice control.  Last Tuesday there was an emergency I had to defuse – Flo got a cow heart delivered to her in the mail with a warning that if she didn’t break with me the next time it would be Sammy’s.”  Sammy was one of Focus Flo Ackerman’s household leaders.  “I was at the lab, refusing to answer the phone, so Connie sent a team over to deliver the message.  I didn’t even come close to losing my temper, but I shorted the lot of them by accident when they showed.  I never do that.”

“Let me guess,” Gilgamesh said.  “There’s going to be a fancy paper coming out someday about Focus pregnancy hormone changes and their effects, isn’t there?”

“Yah.  If I don’t go completely off the deep end first.”  She sighed.  “I probably should have told someone what I was doing for the past few days so they wouldn’t panic.  I only showed up for the beginning of Friday Night; once the festivities started I came up here because I had some juice patterns set up to help me figure out what I’m doing to myself.  I hope they didn’t notice I ended things about a half hour early.”

Gilgamesh made encouraging noises.  He and Lori hadn’t dated, or kissed, or engaged in any activities more intimate than what they were doing now.  But they were in love.  If he hadn’t experienced Carol and his feelings for her, he would have thought he had lost his mind, as the depths of his feelings for Focus Rizzari were so overwhelming.  He knew now that what he felt was only normal for Major Transforms in intimate relationships.  Like all Major Transform emotions, affection, love and lust went to extremes.  As always, he vowed to hold on tight and just see what happened next.

“I’m also having trouble with what Carol did in the fight,” Lori said.  “I’ve seen bad before, but I’ve never had a ringside seat for anything so violent.”  Lori, who the Crows referred to as Gymnast, was one: a hair under five feet tall, all bone, muscle and bounce.  She had been riding on Carol’s shoulders when Carol had taken down Rogue Focus.  Because of one of Rogue Focus’s attacks, Carol’s mind had flipped back to the more primitive instinctive state she had learned to deal with during her withdrawal recovery.  She hadn’t lost her effectiveness, just her normal humanity.

“It’s both bad and good,” Gilgamesh said.  Lori tensed.  “She had to learn to ride her instincts and think magically, her term, while she was recovering from juice withdrawal.  What Rogue Focus’s attack should have done was throw Carol into the same completely mindless state she’d been in after her Enkidu fight, when she killed Kensington.”  The only time she had ever killed a tagged Transform.  “According to the Good Doctor, she’ll become ‘magical instinctive Carol’ any time she gets similarly low on juice.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that when she’s in that state she’s not very safe.  It’s enough to panic me at times.”

“Err,” Lori said, squeezing his left hand.  “That does help.  Nevertheless, seeing Carol rape that defenseless Focus with a metal street sign pole…it just won’t get out of my mind.  I knew in theory that Arms could be brutal, but seeing it close up was disturbing.”

Ah.  “I know that problem,” Gilgamesh said.  “It calls to you and you want to join in in the mayhem – as much as it repels you.  There’s a part of me that would like to cut loose with that level of violence, too.  Later, I want to throw up for even feeling those emotions.”

Lori nodded.  “What is Carol doing to us?  That isn’t the direction I want to be going with my life.”